For decades, they lay in a secret room in her attic gathering dust. Now, newly discovered artworks by the Booker prize-winning author Iris Murdoch – including the only self-portrait she is known to have painted, four surrealist landscape paintings and three sketches of female nudes – will go on display for the first time on Friday.
The artworks were created at the start of the second world war when Murdoch was a student at Oxford. They expose her early interest in surrealism and fascination with the naked female form.
Until now, Murdoch was only known to have created three paintings in her lifetime.
In total, more than 80 new artworks by the novelist were discovered last year at Murdoch’s former home in north Oxford by Dr Miles Leeson, director of the Iris Murdoch Research Centre at the University of Chichester.
He was invited by the executors of Murdoch’s estate to explore 30 Charlbury Road after the death of Audi Bayley, the second wife of Murdoch’s late husband, John Bayley, who lived there until 2024.
Murdoch, who died in 1999 and was known to be a hoarder, had stashed the paintings and sketches in a secret room in her attic. The door was hidden behind a large bookcase. “It was inaccessible,” Leeson said. “It was like an inner sanctum.”
He suspects no one had been inside the room for decades and that only Murdoch and her husband were aware of its existence.
“I don’t think Audi knew about it,” he said. “I don’t think anybody knew about it … there were a lot of personal effects and items in there. Really private stuff.”
Murdoch had realised she was bisexual at 15 and the drawings reveal her fascination with the naked female form, shortly before she embarked on her first known physical relationship with a woman. “There is a sexual frisson in the drawings of female nudes,” Leeson said. “Also the yearning that one feels in these life drawings, these nudes, comes through in her early poetry that is dedicated to women that she desired.”
In 2016, after Audi Bayley invited him round for tea, Leeson became the first person in at least a decade to enter the main, more exposed part of the attic. There, he discovered 600 of Murdoch’s unpublished poems, including many lesbian love poems, buried in a chest.
Last year, in the hidden room, as well as the signed and dated paintings and nude drawings, Leeson found 20 surrealist watercolours, two pencil and watercolour drawings of Murdoch’s parents and more than 50 pencil and pen sketches in two sketchbooks.
“These artworks show her engaging with her world in a new light, displaying a new aspect of Murdoch that was hitherto hidden,” Leeson said. “Artworks and artists are everywhere in her fictional work, and she designs ‘scenes’ in her philosophy as well. Murdoch is a visual artist in all the mediums she was working in, and these newly discovered paintings lend more evidence to this.”
Twenty-five of the newly discovered works, including the self-portrait and the surrealist landscape paintings, will be on display for the first time at the University of Chichester Library until 10 December, as part of an exhibition, Iris Murdoch Amongst the Artists – the first ever devoted to Murdoch as an artist.
It will feature all the major artworks Murdoch is known to have painted during her life, alongside works by British artists who designed her book covers, such as Reynolds Stone and Tom Phillips.
The self-portrait is dated 7 January 1941, revealing how Murdoch saw herself at the age of 21. “It’s a portrait of somebody who’s clearly a deep and expressive thinker,” Leeson said.
The newly discovered surrealist works date from 1939 to 1941, a formative and intensely intellectual period of Murdoch’s life, Leeson said. “These paintings were produced during a really heady time at Oxford, when she was a member of the Communist party, involved in student politics and the student newspaper … and of course, it’s the early years of the second world war, which is reflected in the surrealist landscapes.”
The paintings, which appear to be influenced by the art of Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso, communicated a feeling of despair, anxiety and destruction, he added. “There’s a sense of the breakdown of society, of what’s keeping the centre together. I think she’s trying to say something deeply profound and philosophical about the state of Britain at the time, about the destruction of European culture … She’s capturing the mood of the nation on these canvases.”
He believes she was drawn to the surrealist movement and turned to painting as an experiment. “She’s writing poetry, she’s beginning to write fiction and she’s trying out different art forms and finding out who she is as an artist … it’s all part of one great artistic mind trying to work out where her talents lie.”
There were strong links between these formative works and her later literary masterpieces, Leeson said. “The Black Prince is a work of late modernism in which reality becomes skewed, and in her Booker prize-winning novel The Sea, The Sea, the main character, Charles Arrowby, tries to escape reality and lives within his own mind, and is completely self-absorbed,” he said.
“I think some of Murdoch’s surrealist paintings are asking us to look at reality in a different way and to think about the essentials of the human condition. They add another layer of complexity and interest to the story of Iris Murdoch and how we now consider her in the 21st century.”
